Need advice converting bitmap to EPS

I don't use Illustrator myself, but I have a simple bitmap image (810x273) that I need to have converted to .eps format so I thought I'd post here for some advice. Does anyone know where I can get help having this done? This isn't for any kind of commercial project, and I can't afford to pay to have the conversion done unfortunately, but I'm hoping that there is some kind of help out there that will get me started.

I've tried a couple of 3rd party bitmap to illustrator conversion programs but I couldn't seem to get the result I wanted. My original image is a simple bitmap and *deliberately* pixellated. The conversion programs I've used are trying to smooth out the square/pixellated edges but this isn't what I want. I want the eps file to look exactly like the original bitmap, pixels and all but in a scalable eps format.

I think you'd need to first run a pre-process in Photoshop.
Open the image than - Image / Image Size. In the Image Size dialogue box, make sure to set Resample Image to Nearest Neighbor. Then get out your calculator and multiply your dimension values by 4 (must be multiples of 2). Than save the file as a TIFF with LZW compression.
Open the new TIF image in Illustrator, select the image and click the Live Trace button under the main menu.
You'll probably need to click the drop-down arrow next to the Live Trace button instead, so you'll have access to finer controls under Tracing Options at the bottom of the menu.

The real trick with this process is the pre-process in photoshop. If you aren't able to get satisfactory results after the Live Trace, run your original image through Photoshop again, only this time multiply by 6 or 8 or whatever it takes to get the desired results.

Vince

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